The Inspiring Connections Blog

Today during the winter solstice, I had the pleasure of witnessing a symphony of trumpeter swans and geese creating music together. Their music echoed into the stillness of the surrounding landscape while the sun lowered and set beyond the horizon. It was magical.

Also today, a poem by John Welwood came to mind. Some lines from the poem include

Life includes (or can include) really hard things and awful things, in various places and at various times. Life also includes (or can include) things that are beautiful, often profoundly. One of the things I like about the photographs below is how they include a mix of both shadows, stormy tones, and also vibrancy and light—each apparently juxtaposed with the other.

“We have to open ourselves up to receive what wants to shine back.” — Jessica Dore.

I came across this line recently in the book, Tarot for Change, by Jessica Dore (2021, p. 17). It’s a sentence that has lingered.

There are questions and curiosities that might naturally follow from a sentence like this. Among them are curiosities such as: in any given moment, am I opening or closing right now? In what ways? (And is this opening or closing wise, helpful? Is it helpful in some ways and not in others?)

I think a lot about plants. I think a lot about the interrelationships between things. Take for example, water. Take for example, the absolute necessity of swamps to support well being.¹ Take for example, pollinators. Take for example, how, if you don’t have conditions that support the well-being of pollinators, you don’t have all manner of foods and wonderful and necessary things.²

Whatever you are experiencing in this particular moment, may you feel with you the good company of a kindness or loving energy, and/or the strengthening energy of an expansive sky.

Loving kindness. We all need it.

In the free Insight Timer app (available for ios and adroid), you can find short, 6-minute and 10-minute guided loving kindness meditations offered and led by Sharon Salzberg.

Everyone has a nervous system. One of the things that this nervous system does is it listens. And then it reflects, and then it responds.

I took this photograph today. Later, I noticed hearts lining the spines of some of the leaves.

“You expand and then you meet your own resistance. In the human body and experience, as in nature, there is a continuous play between these forces. We reach to expand and are held back by constriction.”

—Betsy Polatin, Humanual, from Chapter One, (c) 2020